Manufacturing · Decision Intelligence & BI
One governed metric layer replaced four conflicting weekly reports
Weekly performance review preparation reduced from three days to same-day during the measured period
Placeholder content
Illustrative example: this is a composed scenario showing how we report outcomes, not a real client engagement. It will be replaced with approved client stories.
Client context
An industrial components manufacturer with six plants, where operations, finance and sales each maintained their own weekly performance reporting.
Challenge & baseline
Four versions of margin, OTIF and utilization circulated every week. Leadership meetings opened with reconciliation instead of decisions; the baseline showed three days of analyst effort per weekly cycle spent assembling and defending numbers.
Why it mattered
Decision latency compounded: pricing responses, maintenance windows and capacity commitments all waited for agreement on whose numbers were right.
Intervention
A metric tree workshop with the executive team defined ownership for 40 core KPIs; a semantic layer encoded them once; dashboards were rebuilt on the governed definitions; and a conversational assistant let plant managers ask operational questions with answers grounded in the same layer.
AI's role, and where it wasn't the answer
AI powered natural-language querying and narrative summaries over governed metrics. The metric definitions, targets and data pipeline were conventional engineering. That was deliberate, since consistency was the problem, not prediction.
Responsible design
Assistant answers cite the metric definition and freshness; questions it cannot ground in the semantic layer are declined rather than guessed; access mirrors existing row-level security.
Outcome
During the measured period after rollout, weekly review preparation moved from three days of reconciliation to same-day availability, and the four competing reports were retired. Result observed; analyst-time figure validated by the finance owner.
Adoption
Plant managers were trained in role-based sessions; the assistant's usage is reviewed monthly against decision-latency measures, and the metric tree has a named owner in finance.
What next
Scenario modeling for capacity planning is in value proof, gated on the same evidence standard before production.
Delivered with the service line Decision Intelligence & BI through our stage-gated delivery model.